01.29.03
Expectant mother carrying alien baby
Doctors confirmed today that Erica Hughes, of Menlo Park, CA, is carrying an alien baby. This came as something of a surprise to Craig Hughes, who had thought he was the father.Note the ridged forehead and funky eyes which prove conclusively that we’re not alone in the Universe.
Some more normal pictures:
New anti-spam effort
Looks like a new (its new to me anyway) anti-spam effort is getting underway. ASSP looks like multi-word bayesian plus whitelists or something, in an SMTP relay.01.25.03
PPTP and NAT
So I passed a fun night last night trying to get my iptables NAT box to forward PPTP properly so I could log in to the office VPN from my wireless laptop while at home. All the instructions seemed fairly straightforward, but in practice things didn’t go as smoothly as they might. First, though it compiled OK, I couldn’t get my kernel and its modules to load properly (2.4.20) — eventually figured out it was a problem with the generated System.map file — fixed that, then tried to use the patch-o-matic to apply some iptables patches including the conntrack-pptp stuff. After applying the patches, again everything compiled fine, and now the modules were even loading right. But when I tried toiptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
It just gave me a nondescript failure message. Even using lots of -v flags didn’t yield much insight. Eventually, I figured out what was happening: the Mandrake RPMS for iptables were installing binaries in /sbin and libs in /libs, where the iptables built from tarfile defaulted to installing in /usr/local/sbin — and then when I redirected the install directory the first time, I accidentally used /usr/sbin — so it kept not picking up the new userspace binaries, and so user< ->kernel communication kept flaking out. Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Once I got everything compiling, and got MASQUERADE working again, it was just a simple matter of realizing that the kernel wasn’t autoloading either the pptp nor the gre stuff — a small handful of modprobes later and I was browsing the work network.
01.24.03
Finally got 2.4.20 working!
So I was having big problems with undefined symbols in my newly built kernel modules when I ran depmod — I finally figured out how to solve this problem just now. Apparently System.map isn’t being generated correctly any more — possibly because of my version of gcc or something, but anyway, I booted single-user into the newly compiled kernel after building it and pointing lilo at it. I had already built and installed the modules (install gave shitloads of undefined symbols during depmod). Now, in single-user mode, I did acat /proc/ksyms > /boot/System.map-2.4.20 [which was already linked to /boot/System.map]
And now low and behold, it all works!
House inspections
We had the big inspection on the new house today — everything looks pretty good. Doesn’t seem to be falling down the hill, all the walls are there, roof isn’t apparently leaking, etc. A few minor things, plus the main deck outside is somewhat rotten and will need some pretty extensive repair work done on it, but otherwise everything’s looking pretty good. So we’re on target to move in ~Feb 20th.01.22.03
Sweet alumni tracker
Stanford has added a very cool feature to the alumni web site: six-degrees-of-alumni-bacon.Link is here if you happen to be an alumnus and haven’t seen it yet. My userid at the site is just “craig” if you want to link to me.
